Modern technology has made many different types of communication devices, services, networks, and media available to consumers. Accordingly, people have generally become more “connected” than ever before. For example, typical consumers may subscribe to or otherwise use several different types of communication services such as local and long distance telephone, wireless telephone (e.g., cellular), wireless text messaging, instant messaging, Internet access, e-mail, and chat room services, to name several more prominent types of available communication services.
Along with the proliferation of these and other communication services, interest in monitoring and/or controlling usage and content of the services has developed. For example, many parents wish to monitor their children's use of communication services to ensure that the children are not exposed to objectionable materials or malicious persons. Parents may also wish to monitor their children's use of communication services in order to control costs or to know in what activities their children are engaged. By way of example, a parent may wish to know whether a child who is supposed to be doing homework is instead watching television, talking on the telephone, or instant messaging.
Many parental control tools have emerged to help parents or supervisors monitor activities conducted using communication services. For example, some Internet service providers offer content filters for monitoring and blocking objectionable content contained in Internet protocol (“IP”) packets. Third-party software also exists for monitoring the content of IP packets associated with communication services such as e-mail, chat rooms, and instant messaging. However, existing parental control tools are limited to monitoring certain types of communication services. For example, certain existing tools monitor only specific communication services provided over Internet protocol based (“IP-based”) networks such as the Internet. Other existing tools are limited to blocking entertainment content provided over cable television networks. Consequently, existing parental control tools are not capable of robustly monitoring usage of a variety of different types of communication services provided over different types of communication networks.
In particular, many existing tools fail to provide any capability for monitoring usage of communication services over networks that are not based on the Internet protocol. For example, existing tools do not support monitoring of many of the communications services commonly provided over landline and wireless telephone networks. Thus, parents do not have tools available for real-time or near real-time monitoring of the usage of a landline telephone or wireless telephone service, for example.
Because a home, business, or other entity is typically connected to several different types of communication networks (e.g, a landline telephone network, a wireless telephone network, the Internet, and a cable television network), parents or supervisors currently lack tools capable of monitoring usage of many different types of communication services available to children or employees. Moreover, having to use or subscribe to multiple parental control tools is inconvenient, costly, and undesirable to many parents.